Yucca

Key stuff from 2009

The world entered recession officially in 2009, and the accountability of digital became increasingly valuable.

Social was the buzz
2009 was the year that social media went mainstream. The early part of ‘09 saw a number of celebs catalyse adoption; Twitter hosted Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Lily Allen.

The popularity of Twitter, and Facebooks’ amended Twitter-like status update led to an explosion in the microblogging phenomenon.

Now, at the end of 2009, social media and the realtime web are set to have a very real impact on how the likes of Google and Bing index them.

This in itself has further far-reaching implications for SEO strategies going forward – take a look at our recent blog on these changes.

Google STILL performed
Announcing staggering profits in Quarter 3 of this year, Google continues to flourish. Not long after these results it announced the acquisition of yet more companies to further bolster its ever expanding range of products.

2009 brings to a close one of the most significant decades in relation to how we access information since the printing press. It is now such an epic part of everyone’s lives, it’s hard to imagine what it was like before it.

With its success comes size, and with size is a huge responsibility. Google continues to be controversial. No one really knows how much they know about us all but given the accuracy of its results, and the fact we all use so many of their products, they do know a fair amount. Still, the same could be said of a mobile phone company.

On a positive note, Google has made great strides with its stated mission to index the world’s information and deliver the very best user experience for anyone using their products, such as Adwords.

Adwords in itself seems to have grown up hugely throughout 2009. Client pitches are now not dominated by agencies explaining the mechanics of how PPC works – everyone understands. The questions are now, how can you add value?

Apparently YouTube is now paying for itself (which is a good job bearing in mind Google’s server bill for streaming video), but the key to balancing the books has been Google learning how to sell display advertising for the first time. No mean feat for a company built on the huge accountability of Adwords.

The affiliate attribution debate
2009 saw affiliate marketing continue on its crusade from best-kept-secret to the forefront of many brands digital marketing suite. In total, affiliate delivered £4bn of sales in the UK in 2009.

At the Affliate4U forum this year (the premier industry event for affiliate marketers), the central issue for the vast majority was attribution.

To the layman, attribution can quickly become a bewildering subject but, put simply, brands reward their affiliates for sales or leads generated. Affiliates are generally rewarded on a last click wins methodology.

Now there is talk of attribution models which reward all of the affiliates who have been involved in generating a sale. It’s a huge change because, in the UK, the average number of clicks until a user converts is 28 across the likes of PPC, SEO, display and affiliate (source: Google Travel) so there are many interested parties fighting it out.

The debate centres around how the industry should accurately attribute sales and the weighting of value to each affiliate involved in the sales process. Some contend that the first click is the most important - it got the brand in front of the user - whilst others say the last is most important as it closed the sale. But surely there is also value for those in the ‘middle’ of the process too?

In October, eBay went some way to ascertaining a value for each click, however there is still some way to go before there is closure on the topic.

None the less, it’s a healthy debate to have as it is often the first question we’re asked by our new clients.

Microsoft and Yahoo do a deal
So, after Microsoft tried to buy Yahoo outright in 2007, the second and third finishers in the search charts have done a deal.

Pending a final review by The Department of Justice's antitrust division in the US, the licensing deal which will see Yahoo using Microsoft’s search engine Bing to drive it’s search results sometime in January 2010.

Any kind of competition in the search sector has to be good news and, whilst previous versions MSN have been very poor, Bing is a vast improvement and Yahoo know how to sell advertising.

The reality check for Bing in the UK is that in spite of its beta launch this side of the pond, it is still serving-up US centric content. This concerns Microsoft too clearly - the UK media campaign for Bing was shelved with Windows 7 taking up most of the slots.

So expect to hear a lot more about Bing in 2010. But it’s will be a long road to success; Google is also set to include realtime results with its ‘caffeine’ update, so coaxing users away from the Big G will take money, time and more than a bit of luck.

Mobile finally landed
Apple’s iPhone accounted for 1.75% of all product searches and 14% of all mobile phone searches in November this year. So the false dawns are past and mobile is finally getting a foothold.

Network speeds have improved significantly, but it’s the usability improvements delivered by the iPhone and Safari which have really made the difference.

The really exciting development is that there seems to be an increasing amount of proper competition in the form of Google’s Android platform too. Both Android and the iPhone have such fully-featured functionality that the capabilities of their apps are hugely exciting. 2009 has, for the first time, seen the web super-imposed over the physical world around us with apps such as Lastminute’s NRU taking advantage of compass functionality and GPS to give real time information fresh from the web about nearby cafes and bars. Redlaser, a price comparison tool on the the iPhone, scans a barcode and then sends the data over the internet to find the cheapest price for the product in the area.

All of this stuff was possible before but it was slow, clunky and on dubious operating systems like Symbian S60.

Augmented reality (man)
This newish technology involves super-imposing digital data/images/animation on our world, via a webcam – and it seems to have got a huge amount of press this year.

It looks a bit witchcrafty on first view and definitely has the wow factor initially. Whether it sustains the press coverage and user interest in 2010 remains to be seen.

Here is an example that we like.

Bring on 2010, I'm sure it is going to be at least as exciting digitally!